In studying the morning crepuscules of Love, we have involuntarily outlined the first phases of Love. We have seen him timid and spasmodic, exerting himself between the swaddling clothes of infancy and the first weapons of arrogant youth, like a boy warrior armed with a wooden sword and a pop-gun. During the age of adolescence this sovereign affection shows the most sublime puerilities, the maddest hysterias, the most fanciful vows of an infinite without limits of time or space. Side by side with the most ideal aspirations we find, however, the impetuous and automatic outbreaking of the first lusty actions; and a youthful imagination, inflaming the first fevers of lust, agitates and shakes the tender and fragile organism. Happy those who in the first storms of life find a friendly hand as a guide and solace to preserve them from thousands of dangers which threaten health and morality at the same time.
The first, impatient acts of lust in adolescence are generally followed in elect natures by a period of reaction, during which heroic vows of chastity are made together with extraordinary endeavors to learn to hate woman. Just at that time, in the diary of the boy who is about to become a man, we may read these vows and aspirations for chastity which I literally reproduce here for you:
" ... Tremendous dilemma of life; the cosmos less the woman—the woman less the cosmos."
" ... Tremendous dilemma of life; the cosmos less the woman—the woman less the cosmos."
"I have been able to pass an entire day without embracing a woman and without any fervid aspiration forher; and yet I have passed a very happy day! Try and do without the evil-born race of Eve, for all time."
"I have been able to pass an entire day without embracing a woman and without any fervid aspiration forher; and yet I have passed a very happy day! Try and do without the evil-born race of Eve, for all time."
"I took a seat near a Creole young lady and found her beautiful, inebriating, voluptuous. I thought of a paradise of delights in looking at her, and wavered. The most Creole embrace in the world, however, is not worth the cosmic synthesis as I have conceived it and as I will expose it to men."
"I took a seat near a Creole young lady and found her beautiful, inebriating, voluptuous. I thought of a paradise of delights in looking at her, and wavered. The most Creole embrace in the world, however, is not worth the cosmic synthesis as I have conceived it and as I will expose it to men."
"No pleasure is shorter than the erotic delirium; no sacrifice more fruitful of useful consequences than the disdain for this voluptuousness."
"No pleasure is shorter than the erotic delirium; no sacrifice more fruitful of useful consequences than the disdain for this voluptuousness."
"Instinct, with the fury of its power, is for you the outward manifestation of pleasure in its most attractive aspect; it is only a faculty of yours, and tends to draw into its whirlpool all your activity."It is only one of your faculties and that which you have in common with the lowest creatures at the bottom of the series of creation, and this faculty wants to be the first; the first and only for a few moments; but in these moments the least noble of your powers wants to, and can, take a great part of yourself, of yourego. It is a sovereign who rules only for a few seconds, but who has power enough during the period of his reign to destroy half of the state and leave his throne upon a heap of ruins, firebrands and ashes; it is easy to destroy, but from a mass of ruins and ashes to rebuild a state is a hopeless task."
"Instinct, with the fury of its power, is for you the outward manifestation of pleasure in its most attractive aspect; it is only a faculty of yours, and tends to draw into its whirlpool all your activity.
"It is only one of your faculties and that which you have in common with the lowest creatures at the bottom of the series of creation, and this faculty wants to be the first; the first and only for a few moments; but in these moments the least noble of your powers wants to, and can, take a great part of yourself, of yourego. It is a sovereign who rules only for a few seconds, but who has power enough during the period of his reign to destroy half of the state and leave his throne upon a heap of ruins, firebrands and ashes; it is easy to destroy, but from a mass of ruins and ashes to rebuild a state is a hopeless task."
These few expressions are but the thousandth reproduction of a psychical phenomenon which is reiterated in all men when they pass from the threshold of adolescence into the gardens of youth. An historical fact and a proverb embodied this truth in two great monuments: in the Council of Trent those who voted for celibacy were the youngest priests; and the French language has a proverb which says: "If youth but knew; could age but do!"—a vote and aproverb deserving a volume of meditations, and springing forth from the deepest roots of the human heart.
Exuberance of forces prepares us for the battle; but, at the same time, it leaves us calm and serene, because true force is always calm. Rarely a braggart is strong, and a frequent intimation of one's own energy is nearly always a symptom of decline and weakness. The invalid who fears death often says that he feels very well, even before being asked about his health, and endeavors to delude himself and others with respect to the danger that threatens him.
A young man is, in love, always more timid than an adult or an old man; and this fact originates from so many and mysterious causes as to occur in many animals as well. Birds, among others, the older they are, the quicker they go at their amorous undertaking. A young man, however deep his love may be, still trembles. He is a ripe and fragrant fruit, but the rude contacts of the gardener and the store have not deprived him yet of his untouched varnish. He has foregone the useless and too unequal struggles against love and flung himself into its arms; but he still trembles when the currents of the god pass through his body and cause his nerves to vibrate. He is a priest initiated into the mysteries of the temple, but still trembling when in thesanctum sanctorum, and a gentle and sublime timidity tempers in him the too virile expression of strength. Before our eyes we have one of the most sublime pictures of the moral world: the apex of beauty without the mannerism of pride, the maximum of strength without a shadow of convulsion; an ever lively force, a serene but definite energy, ready to spring, ready for action and reaction.
A young man with a good physical constitution belongs entirely to love, and love is the property of youth. All the energies of sentiment, all the powers of thought at that age are moulded by that sovereign affection, which absorbs and carries away everything into its hot and turbulent whirlpools. He is less than a eunuch who does not love at twenty, because even a eunuch can love, and there is an amorous sterility which has its seat in the brain and in the heart, andwhich is more humiliating than any mutilation of organs, than any lack of functions. If, at twenty, a man does not encounter a woman in the social world, he loves the picture or statue of a woman, he loves the heroine of a story or of a poem, and the young girl adores the angels whose wings flutter around her virginal bed.
At twenty, one should possess the physical energy to love a hundred women, and even the most modest maiden finds in the air, at every step, a spark darting from her contact with a man. Notwithstanding, however, a gigantic and fruitful possibility of polygamy, man and woman are, in their robust youth, essentially monogamous, and in their most senseless idolatries they are still monotheists. One god, one temple, one religion only. One must be born with singular perversity to be polygamous from the first steps in love, and the young girl who already loves more than one man at a time must have been conceived in a bawdy-house by the kneading of the blood and the flesh of a bacchante.
Yet against this virtuous, energetic, holy monogamy there rise on all sides enormous obstacles; formidable adversaries move against it from every quarter, opposing the first steps. Adam has found his Eve; Eve has seen her Adam; but in the embrace of those two lovers, how many enemies, how many barriers, how many abysses! Adam loves Eve; Eve loves Adam; what can be more simple, what affinity more intense, what affection more inevitable than their union? Still before they can embrace each other, these two unfortunate creatures must ask permission of prejudice, hypocrisy, conventionalities, hygiene, morality, religion, and above all, finance; and there is scarcely one chance out of a hundred that the answer will be a "yes" from all these superior authorities that have the right of vetoing their affection. The nightingale has seen and loved his modest companion; in the deep shadow of a mysterious alder he has sung to her his tenderest song and infused his love into her. Today they sleep, happy in their love, and tomorrow they will find flexuous branches and soft moss to weave their nest. No need of civil matrimony, of religious matrimony, offinancial matrimony. But woe to the man who shall rely upon nature to have his nest prepared! The morrow of his loves would be cursed by hunger; and scrofula and rachitis would kill his children, born of a union which lacked the consent of finance.
From the clash of two contrary forces there arises a decomposition of movements, a transformation of energies; and this phenomenon occurs in love when, pure, virginal, powerful and hardly issued from the hot bosom of nature, it finds the sharp rocks of social obstacles, and, like a wave, breaks against them, raises a mass of foam and withdraws dragging away a congeries of stones, splinters and mud scattered by the turbulent clashing of so many forces and resistances. Would fortune that in that first shock love should suffer nothing but sorrow! Tears have blessed thousands of loves and bathed them in a sweet dew; very few have they killed. But in the dashing of the first love against the cruel rock of social resistances many new forces, all of them ruthless, spring from the decomposition of the two contrary motions, and a thousand compromises with conscience stain in its swaddling clothes the new-born love, humiliating it under the shame of an original sin.
The very first compromise with his own conscience on the part of a pure and enamored youth, when prevented by society from being monogamous, is that of decomposing love into sentiment and voluptuousness; thus he strives to preserve his heart pure and to erect one temple only, while sacrifices are offered to lust on the hundred altars of the wandering Venus.
And still this decomposition of love seems to the most refined and most virtuous lovers a very wise move, a miracle of art, the ideal of morality coupled with the most urgent needs of a heart and senses; and after a few skirmishes and lamentations every one adapts himself to this compromise and tries to make himself as comfortable as possible, as though in an uncomfortable carriage in which one must journey for a long time. The most considerate, the most virtuous lovers, however, are continually looking forward tothe fortunate day when all hypocrisy will be eliminated and physical and moral loves united will give them the right to build a nest in which sentiment and voluptuousness will keep faithful company. And in the meantime we just go on between a reticence and a lie; the heart to the wife of another, the body to the courtesan.
Those young men who adapt themselves too easily to this ignominious and degrading compromise with their conscience are cruelly punished for their crime, since they will not know the richest and most splendid treasures of youthful love. Do not lie, do not betray; do not seek your love in the mire, but in the sky; and then abandon your heart and senses to the wave that carries you to paradise. Inhale all the perfumes, pick all the flowers of a garden over which no winter breeze ever blows, and where for every petal that falls a hundred new corollas blossom. Be rich, be recklessly rich; be gods at least once in your life: nature concedes a day of spring even to the most miserable creature and weaves a garland on the head of the lowliest of men. Remember, there is no coffer in which an hour of sunlight can be kept, no artifice of chemical science that can preserve a blooming rose.
The fortunate young man who has not subjected his love to the process of decomposition we have described loves ardently, recklessly, splendidly. His love is a sunny day in May, without clouds, without chills, without sorrows; it is a feast where weariness, fatigue and delusions are unknown. He lives because he loves, and he loves because he lives. He burns his incense to the goddess, but he is chaste and knows very little of lasciviousness. He is sometimes so pure as to call a blush on the face of a woman who, being in her thirties, already loves too knowingly. He neither measures nor weighs; and who has ever dared to reduce to a mathematical formula the force of a thunderbolt or the kilogrammeters of an earthquake? And the loves of a young man are thunderbolts or earthquakes. A young man is not very jealous; he is less so, in any case, than the adult and the old; he is tooconfident, too happy to doubt; and, besides, he has no time! His lips are wreathed in a perpetual smile; a golden ray of sunlight rests on his brow like a halo of bliss. There is no tomorrow for him except under the form of a continuation of the happiness of today; he does not remember the past, and in good faith believes himself to have always loved his goddess, even when he did not know her. He believes in inborn loves, as the philosopher of old used to believe in congenital ideas. O happy youth!
If the young man is the most powerful, the most ardent lover, the adult is the most skillful. The use and abuse of life have somewhat dulled his spirit, almost extinguished the flames of passion; but no excessive impatience, no needless timidity, no sudden explosions of desire oppose any obstacle to the blissful perfection of his loves. He loves with shrewdness, with passion, with a most subtle art; he is a hundred times more libertine than the youth, but also more delicate, richer in exquisite tastes belonging to the world of thought. The youthful lover is a nude and often ferocious savage; the adult has become civilized from long experience and is clothed with the blandishments of his art. His most spontaneous sympathies are for unripe fruit, for the flowers still enclosed within the untouched and thorny calyx of innocence and ignorance; but he likes to love the independent woman as well, the widow and the matron; he is essentially eclectic. His joys are scarcer than in the days of youth, but they are more precious, because rendered more savory by a certain economy almost verging on avarice. He knows that his hours are numbered and follows with a caress every coin he spends; before parting with it, he bestows upon it a look of affection and regret. Rich in memories, but poor in hopes, he concentrates all his cares, patience and attention on the present. He is the ablest, the wisest master of love; and when health and freshness of heart do not desert him, he can awaken ardent and lasting passions and preserve them for a long time. Woman much less than man is bent on inquiring about white hair and birth certificates; and if sheonly feels that she is loved deeply and ardently, she willingly forgets half a score of years, and more, of the age of her companion.
In the love of the adult man for the young woman one feels always a benevolent and sympathetic protection, an almost paternal affection, full of tenderness and generous impulses. This characteristic tends to deprive mature love of some of the warmest and most voluptuous expansions, to cool down the volcanic explosions of youthful love; but the paternal affection, which might easily tend to become authority and eliminate the perfect equality between the two lovers, is tempered in adult man by a deep and hidden mistrust of himself.
The young man asks for love on his knees, but knows that he is legitimately entitled to it, and often from the humble position of a beggar of alms, prostrated in the dust, he leaps to his feet, demanding with the force of beauty, genius, passion, that which he could not obtain by humility. A mature man, on the contrary, has lost many rights, and his requests are made with greater constraint, with a reserve full of grace and delicacy; he often implores with a tenderness so ardent and a tone so supplicatory that it is difficult to answer with a refusal. The continual alternation of an authority that teaches and an authority that implores gives the adult love the most characteristic hue, the most conspicuous mark. And when poor nature, medicated by art, has succeeded in attaining love, the precious affection firmly fixes itself on it and thrusts its roots into the deepest recesses of the heart. The adult has tenacious passions, and none is more faithful in love than he; often, conditions being equal, he is the best husband, and not only through egotism does the bridegroom seek a bride a few years younger than himself. Man grows old later than woman, and two ignorant and very young people seldom wed without exposing themselves to the most serious dangers.
The woman of thirty, also, loves with modesty, with deep tenderness, with religious fidelity, with avaricious sagacity.
The man who is growing old is the trunk of a tree onwhich every day a branch withers, and from which every gust of wind detaches a handful of yellow leaves. When the entire tree is dead, then upon the ruins of love rises an implacable hatred for those who love and are loved; the cruel domestic inquisitions and a posthumous, ridiculous ostentation of forced continence or mummified modesty will then poison the existence of the intolerant old man, who avenges himself upon the young people for his misfortune in not being longer able to love. It is an inexorable law which condemns those old men to mystic and wrathful meditations, because in all times and in all countries the last spark of lust serves to light the bilious taper on the altar of superstition. Most unfortunate is the poor young girl who must have as a confidante of her first loves an irascible and bigoted old woman, to whom love is a synonym of lechery and affection a sin. Less monstrous and less cruel is the deformity of a Chinese foot than the contortions which a youthful love must undergo in the hooked and yellow clutches of intolerant bigotry.
Man, however, is a tree so robust and vigorous that it rarely dies all at once, and in the old man there often remains flourishing the only branch of lust. It is then that the economy of the adult turns into real avarice, lust becomes lasciviousness, and love assumes unheard-of forms, worthy of Tiberius and Caligula. The lust of the old man, warmed by the stifling atmosphere of vice, is like a mushroom produced by the fetid artifices of horticulture and bears fruits which give out in the distance the stench of the manure in which they were raised. Nor can the name of love be given to those lusts, but they should be given that of erotic mercature, of prostitution of innocence to the calculus of probability of life, or to the expectation of an inheritance. And yet some powerful lovers maintain ghosts of desire until their extreme decrepitude and, like eels, go on rubbing their frothy paunches in the hot mire of the lowest social strata; to their last breath, with their ossified hands they strip of leaves the rosebushes and purchase at fabulous prices an "I love you" icier than snow, more deceitful than Tartufe.
The man of high type, too, can love until old age; but then, lust being spent, every right of conquest having been abandoned, love soars to the highest spheres of the ideal world and becomes a sublime contemplation of feminine beauty. Whether before the maiden and heroic greatness of Joan of Arc, or the startling sensuality of the statue of Phryne by Barzaghi, hearing the lively prattling of a girl of fourteen or at the side of a calm and plump matron, even a venerable old man, without any offense in words or acts, feels moved; and, perhaps, under the childlike or compassionate caresses of a woman, his eyes will fill with tears and, if he is a believer, he will invoke the benedictions of Heaven on the most beautiful half of the human family.
If even the old man can love a young woman, the old woman also can love a young man; but their love should be a serene contemplation of the beautiful, a suave remembrance of joys possessed for a long time and ardent aspirations for an ideal which is ever loved, because it is never attained. Even the white-haired old man can, without offending the modesty of her who cannot be his any more, caress with paternal affection the curls of Eve, adore in her the most splendid manifestation of the esthetic forces of nature, warm his cold imagination again at the ardent fire of others' loves; and, without envy and without regrets, but with sweet satisfaction he can say: "I, too, have done my duty; do yours now. I, too, have loved without sowing the seeds of remorse for my old age; try you, and follow my example!"
I shall not repeat in these pages for the hundredth time the criticism of temperaments as they were described by the ancient schools, and which I have expounded in many of my works, small and large. Not everybody has accepted my standards of classification, but all agree with me in the belief that temperaments have had their time, and that hygiene, medicine, psychology await from the progress of modern physiology the elements to determine, as science requires, the physical and moral characteristics of a human individual. Against this impotency of modern physiology I have protested, changing the name of "temperament" to that of "individual constitution": innocent revenge of all men who, when powerless to change a thing, satisfy their rage by changing its name.
Every man loves in his own way and, as we bring to love the greatest possible tribute of psychical elements, it follows that human loves differ more than hatreds, more than the manners of eating, of motion, of will. The lower we descend from the branches to the trunk, the more human elements resemble each other; the higher we ascend to the loftiest branches of the tree, the more the elements diverge and differ. Ask a woman of easy virtue, or a Don Juan, how many are the methods of loving, and they both not only will answer that every one loves in a different manner, but will add that the manners themselves are so extraordinarily different that calling all these most variform ways of loving by the one name of the same sentiment excites repugnance.
It is true that some authors have amused themselves bydescribing a "sanguine love," a "nervous love," a "lymphatic love," a "hepatic love"; but these pictures are innocent pastimes, arabesques traced on the epidermis of human nature, and the schools of psychology and literature, which succeed each other, so completely obliterate these arabesques that not the least trace of them is left. Even when, instead of the caricatures of temperaments, we should succeed in delineating a true family of human constitutions, it would be very difficult to class under it all forms of love. The thousands and thousands of color cases of the Roman mosaic-maker are sufficient to classify the innumerable tints that an expert eye succeeds in discerning; but who will give me a palette so gigantic that I may spread on it all the polychromic mixtures, all the simple and compound colors, all the proteiform iridescences offered by the human light when it strikes the powerful prism of love?
The question as to the quantity of love which an individual may feel is the easiest to solve; but it is also one of the most important. In every psychological problem there is an element of quantity; and as it is the simplest, it is also the most visible. It is, I would almost say, the skeleton of the phenomenon and we should grasp it eagerly, as the thread which guides us through the labyrinth of these studies.
Many men, even if possessing a lofty mind and a gentle heart, have asked themselves seriously, and more than once, whether they were capable of loving, unacquainted as they were with all that world of mysteries and passions which they found described in many books and heard from the mouths of some enamored friends. To those men my book, although I have striven to contain it within the limits of a physiological study, may seem an exaggeration, a caricature of nature. Now, all those men are petty and weak lovers. To them love is an intermittent prurience that begins at eighteen years and ends, perhaps, at forty, or fifty at the latest; a prurience that stands somewhere between pleasure and bother and which can be morally cured by only one medicine, woman. This medicine, so they say, is sometimes worse than the disease, and it is necessary to reflect at lengthand with great care whether preference should be given to that prurience which poets call "love," or to that other load which naturalists call "the female of man" and the courteous dictionaries "woman." When these eunuchs of the sentiment of love prefer the woman, they may find that this animated object, so like ourselves, is also tolerably pleasing and congenial, and a sweet and tender habit of benevolence may tie them to this companion whom they love, and truly love, in their own way, that is, calmly, prudently, suavely. These unhappy creatures have more than one reason to ask of themselves whether what they feel is love, and a thousand reasons to inquire of true lovers: "But tell me now, will you explain to me what this love is!" The moon radiates heat; frogs, too, develop heat: well, then, these gentlemen, too, do love!
Peaceful love, petty or cold love (call it what you will) does not exclusively belong to the male; but, on the contrary, it offers, although more rarely, its most perfect forms in woman. Man, however weak a lover he may be, cannot renounce the mission of sex, which compels him to attack, assault, declare that war which must lead him to conquest. Woman, on the contrary, if she be born aeunuch, need not attack her companion in the slightest way; she can, if she so wishes, avoid the trouble of directing her gaze toward her lover or opening her lips to say "yes." To let herself be loved will be enough. How many romantic delights in these few words! To let herself be loved; to leave to others every labor of conquered timidity, of injured modesty; every strategy, every tactic of moral violence; to let the others struggle and reserve for herself alone the voluptuousness of slightly opening the door or even letting others open it! To let herself be loved! What esthetic, heavenly beatitude, what voluptuousness of soft undulations and carnal prurience, what wonderful warmth of sweet caresses! And, then, no responsibility for the future of a passion which has never been confessed; no storm; a calm lake without tempest, without tides. And if the heart, full of sentiment, would take the liberty of a restless throb, to apply then and therea cataplasm to bring it back to its duty, and modesty to justify the perpetual ice, and virtue to apologize for the absence of aroma. Oh, why did not heaven make us out of this blessed, soft, sweet paste? Oh, why can we not reduce love to a problem of hygiene and régime?
From this zero of the amatory scale we gradually rise to the maximum degree of the pyrometer, where every metal is melted and volatilized and the entire human organism is transformed into a red and incandescent vapor that burns everything it touches. There are tremendous lovers, who have loved before they were men, who will love, too, when they are men no longer; there are women who have loved, perhaps, since they were closed in the maternal womb, and will love even the sexton who will nail down the cover on the cold coffin which contains their morbid flesh; there are men and women in whom every affection takes a sensual form and love absorbs them like a sponge born, grown and dead in the saline depths of a tropical sea. Having neither time nor patience to wait, they love the first comer, to whom they lend their affections and their imagination; then, discouraged but not wearied, they love the next comer and, always loving more than they are loved, they remain with their thirst forever unquenched. Happy they are when they succeed, although rarely, in being satisfied with consecutive loves; but oftener they precipitate quickly into polygamy, where, through sophisms, reticences and compromises with conscience, they love this one with the heart, that other one with the mind, and all of them with the senses. They have afirstlove, anonlylove, atruelove; but too frequently they forget the names of such loves and use them to designate too many different lovers, and, like the octopus, they stretch forth their numerous, avid, sucking arms to reach the hot, succulent flesh of the feminine cosmos. Among these polygamists there are some who love only with the heart, others only with the senses; while to a few giants nature concedes the sad gift of a twofold thirst for affection and voluptuousness.
Between these two poles, which mark the extreme degreesof amatory intensity, plods the innumerable mass of those men who are neither Don Juans nor chaste Josephs; the numberless women who are neither Messalinas nor Joans of Arc.
Besides the variform force of amorous needs, the sentiment which we are now studying together assumes a different character, according to the passion which predominates in the individual and by which love is marked as proud, humble, egotistical, vain, furious, jealous. And around these binary compounds of love and pride, of love and egotism, of love and vanity, there are grouped many other minor elements, which, although with less energetic affinity, still form a homogeneous whole that might be called a "temperament of love" or a "constitutional form of love." I shall try to sketch some of them from nature.
Tender Love.—This love is more frequently felt by men of mild and gentle character; it has shaded outlines and little relief. Emotion surprises them for the slightest cause; tears are always ready to gush forth at the first impulse of joy or sorrow; a perennial compassion and an inexhaustible tenderness drown declarations of love, ardors of voluptuousness and outbursts of affection in a most sweet sea of milk and honey. Tender love is suppliant, lachrymose and faithful; it often touches the boundaries of sensual love, but never enters that sea under full sail. It is a love that is frequently constant and trustworthy, almost as immutable as an old and serene friendship; it has, however, a tendency to being disconsolate and mournful, if not querulous, and it sighs, sobs or weeps too often. Nevertheless, it is capable of wonderful expansiveness which, however interminable, is pregnant with intense joy and sweet solace and predisposes us to universal benevolence, to philanthropy, to forgiveness. It is a Christian, evangelical love that delights more in a caress than in a kiss, and in lingering kisses more than in sudden battles. Its most esthetic forms are found in the woman, whom we readily exculpate from a certain weakness and who may even swoon without making herself ridiculous.Persons with fair complexion, Germans and lymphatic creatures love in this way.
Contemplative Love.—A high, esthetic sense, an irresistible tendency to inertness and limited genital needs constitute the soil in which germinate and grow the various forms of contemplative love. It is a lofty love—too lofty; it has something of the mystic and the supernatural; the lover places his idol very high and prostrates himself before it, lavishing upon it every kind of adoration and incense. Contemplative love is situated in the anterior lobes of the brain; it affects but slightly the somber depths of the heart and hardly skims over the warm wave of voluptuousness; it lives on ecstasies and contemplations and, making of the creature it loves a god or a goddess, it forgets too frequently that the god comprehends a human male, the goddess a human female. This sublime forgetfulness makes of this love the greatest cuckold ever known, because nature can neither be forgotten nor offended with impunity; and while one adores and is absorbed in admiration in the temple, the warlike and rapacious love profanes the tabernacle and carries off the god. Contemplative love lives on the frontiers of pathology, and properly belongs to Arcadic, fanatic and mystic persons. Disillusioned and betrayed, they accuse love of simony and falsehood, when they themselves are only too guilty of having caused their own sorrows and their own bitter disappointments.
Sensual Love.—This is one of the most ardent, most inebriating, most tenacious of loves, because it springs from the most fruitful and spontaneous source of sensual affections. It is the most sincere and most powerful of loves, because it satisfies one of the most natural and most irresistible needs of man; but its foundation rests on a shifting ground: beauty; and its ardors are indicated by too deep a note: desire. It never lies; it does not wrap itself in the hundred cloaks of amorous hypocrisy, but is nude, entirely nude and, in its nudity, often modest. Brazen or tender,insatiable or satisfied, rash to the point of insolence, it is, however, always itself: the tremendous attraction of two great and opposite organic units; a burning thirst that seeks the cool water of the Alpine spring; the most vigorous clash of the two most gigantic forces in the world of the living. From voluptuousness to voluptuousness, if youthful strength does not accompany it, it usually slides into lasciviousness, where it sinks deeper each day that passes and with the decline of each force; and down, down it plunges until it reaches the filth of domestic libertinism or that of the wandering Venus. It is inexhaustible in discoveries and inventions, indefatigable in voluptuousness; it is also a sublime artist; it may emit high musical notes of tenderness and show warm and fascinating tints. Born in the lowest depths of the animal man, it rarely rises to the high spheres of the ideal and knows no dignity, no delicacy, no heroism; rather, it is often suppliant to the point of baseness, impure to nausea. It accepts a bone to gnaw, just as it accepts voluptuousness without love. It does not matter to sensual love whether voluptuousness is reached by the sole moral path of love, but it accepts it also through this way, it seeks it by all possible ways. And it conquers, steals, buys love; it goes even so far as to borrow it, to commit forgery, provided it gets it. Let its insatiable prurience be but appeased and sensual love will act as mediator or pander for the loves of others, become usurer, thief and forger with the same callousness. This love is generally masculine: in women, even licentiousness always dons a splendid robe of sentiment and hides its too insolent nudity.
Ferocious Love.—Perhaps the term which is applied to this love is stronger than it should be; but in painting a psychical picture one is irresistibly inclined to exaggerate the coloring or the outlines and give the subject more relief than it has in nature. Abnormal development of the sense of ownership, amplified by conceit and joined to a certain impetuosity of character: such is the most natural source of all those violent loves which I class under the common nameof "ferocious love." Its birth is nearly always like the eruption of a volcano and accompanied by so many storms and fits of affection and such clashing of energies that one would suppose that, instead of a love, a hatred had come into existence. And this original sin follows it through life, and ends only with death. We see this love distribute handshakes with such strength that we say they are tetanic convulsions, kisses that seem bites, embraces that look like homicides; and we behold it as a tyrant without jealousy, a fury without anger, insatiable even after possession, because voluptuousness does not calm nor fidelity always satisfy it. Venus triumphant and not disarmed would represent this love in all the sublime greatness of its forces. If kindness of habits or the patient file of education does not succeed in smoothing its angles, it often becomes rugged and even brutal. So must have loved our most remote ancestors of the caves and the palisades, who continuously bathed in the blood of hunt and war and stained their hands with blood in love as well, as woman also was the prey belonging to the strongest and most audacious. As it is easy to imagine, man generally is the one who loves ferociously; but woman, too, occasionally feels this cruel form of love; and the more attached she is to her lover, the more she torments him and the deeper she plunges the claws of her passion into the depths of his body to feel its heat and to say with voluptuous fury: "This, too, is mine!"
Proud Love.—This form is a binary combination of one part of love and ten parts of self-love. When proud love is satisfied, when it is in all the pomp of its happiness, it may appear as a pure, great, sublime love; but as soon as self-love suffers a sting it froths and swells like a snail or a basilisk and shows the dual nature of its energy in all its nudity. Even in the few moments when this affection is entirely happy, it never betokens it nor does it abandon itself to an unrestrained confession of beatitude or bliss, for the same reason that the rustic never admits that he admires new and great things. Proud love thinks more of being loved thanof loving; it always speaks of rights and often does not know of duties. Rich in exactions and poor in consideration, it swells up with pride if fortunate, and murmurs at the slightest suspicion; it is the most jealous of loves and among the most unhappy, among the poorest in sweet abandonments and ingenuous voluptuousness. Even in the most secret intimacy it never unfolds its thoughts for fear of ridicule or of spoiling a crease of the starched paludament in which it has wrapped itself; it is never the first to concede a caress, but expects it as a right and a duty. It is a love which, to be approached, requires infinite attentions, ceremonies, formalities; which quickly becomes tiresome and often disgusting. It exacts fidelity, not as a dear reciprocation of affection, but as a right of its own dignity, and easily pardons such sins as the world does not become aware of. It is a sterile, barren, sickly love.
Excoriated Love.—Because of its origins, this form of love is often confounded with the preceding; but it is still more unhappy and rightfully belongs to the pathology of the heart. It is a love that can be sincere, tender and passionate; but it is so irritable and such a grumbler that a mosquito would annoy it and a pebble in its path cause it to cry against misfortune and treachery. Like the Epicurean of old, it cannot sleep unless a folded rose-leaf is placed in its bed. It also seeks, like all human affections, the goal of its aspirations; but never reaches it, because suspicion, susceptibility and fear stop it at every step, freeze the words on its lips, weaken its arms in the embrace, extinguish its flame when hardly lighted. I compare this affection with a St. Bartholomew obliged to walk among brambles and over rocks bristling with points, and for this reason I have given it the strange and new name ofexcoriated love; the French would call itun amour mauvais coucheur. It is perhaps the most wretched of loves, because, besides the natural misfortunes which are the inevitable lot of every daughter of Eve and every son of Adam, it creates its own troubles and enlarges them with the lens of the most unhappy imagination.Excoriated love is a fatal still which transforms rose-petals into poison-ivy, honey into wormwood, aroma into fetidness, nourishment into venom. If kissed, it murmurs because the kiss was too violent or too cold; if caressed, it suspects that the caress may have had a second end in view. Even in the ecstasies of creation it would ask of the Creator why He had made the light so soon or so late. Whoever is loved by these unfortunates has always the right to address them with the words of the courtesan of Venice to the unhappy and mad philosopher of Geneva: "Zaneto, Zaneto, ti non ti xe fato per far a l'amor!" ("Johnny, Johnny, you are not made to make love!") And yet these unfortunate creatures love, and love deeply; and it is the enviable glory of powerful lovers to cure and win them over to the point of making them confess that at least once in their lives they were truly, faithfully and passionately loved. It is one of the most admirable triumphs of the amatory art to find a fabric so fine that it can touch the excoriated flesh of those poor unfortunates, and create for them an artificial atmosphere, in which they may be able to move without groaning, breathe without coughing, and live without cursing life.
These forms of love, which I have poorly outlined, are but rarely found in nature in a simple state, but are complicated and interwoven with each other, forming a thousand pictures: a real mine of resources for art, a veritable treasure of torments for the psychological thinker.
No man loves like another and no man loves perfectly, in the manner in which the type of a sublime love can be idealized in the regions of thought of our brain.
The perfect harmony of one love lacks a note of sensuality, that of another a tone of energy; one is too restless, another too languid, a third too violent. Even the most fortunate creatures, those who possess a just measure of voluptuousness, of sentiment and of poetry,—even those, who know they are loved ardently and faithfully, aspire to a love more perfect than that which they feel and better than that which they receive; and when this thirst for the ideal does not induceus to violate the compact of fidelity, we should not complain, because love, too, must obey the common law, which compels us ever to aspire to purer regions, richer in splendors and warmer with ardors. At early dawn love awaits the promise of a warm noon, and in the burning sultriness looks forward with eager anticipation to the cool twilight of the evening; it is spurred by that impulse which drives forward men and things, matter and force, and the bliss of today expects a more intense voluptuousness for tomorrow. If this unquenchable thirst for the better should cease in us, it would be simply because life is spent in us; if the irresistible desire for a higher love should cease, it would be simply because, as light to the blind, the heavenly regions of the ideal—those regions where numberless targets are gathered at which are aimed the glances and the arrows of the human family—have all at once been closed to us.
Pain, so rich in afflictions and tortures, in its varieties as infinite as the grains of sand in the ocean, and as deep as the ocean's abysses, has reserved its greatest bitterness, its most cruel torments for love. And so it was to be; the warmest passion was to turn into the most inflexible frigidity; the deepest was to precipitate itself into the somberest depths; the richest in joys to be the most fecund in sorrows. From the fleeting breeze of a suspicion more rapid than the lightning, more evanescent than a word written in the soft sand of the seashore, to the certain consciousness of an unexpected betrayal; from the impatience of him who for one instant awaits his beloved, to the prolonged desperation of him who can no longer wait, love evinces all the notes of affliction, all the torments of the senses, all the tortures of sentiment. Of the bones which are scattered every day on the long path through which the human family passes on this planet, many were left by love; and suicide, homicide and insanity count in cemeteries and hospitals a much greater number of victims than are reckoned in the summary statistics of our sociologists. All this, of course, is for those who love with heart and mind and not with senses only. He who sees in love a question only of régime and hygiene recovers from the loss of his sweetheart with a tear and a new conquest; cures betrayal with betrayal, and with licentiousness heals every malady of the heart and drowns all his sorrows in his libertinism.
I certainly have neither strength nor courage sufficient to accompany the reader into the lower regions of the amorous hell. If you have already passed your thirtieth year, yousurely must have among the memories of your past some half hour of desperation and some sleepless night which make you shudder only by recalling them; you must have suffered certain torments, compared to which Dante's infernal region will seem blooming flower-beds to you, and you must imagine that nature rarely torments one man with all the tortures of the amorous passion. In human nature some sorrows make the heart incapable of suffering certain others, and the morbid rage of jealous pride protects us against the bitter sob of a generous sorrow, just as the chaste reserve of a modest nature deprives us of the possibility of suffering the ardent thirst for certain pleasures.
If you wish to open just a little the door of this hell, if you want to sound its abysses with a passing glance, imagine on one side all the hopes, all the voluptuousness, all the riches of love, and on the other all the fears, all the bitternesses, all the miseries. And after this cruel exposition of the joys and sorrows of love, you will not have ended yet, because the fields of sufferance are a hundred times larger than those where joy is sown. The physical possession of a woman is one; the tortures of a man beholding the fruit near without his being able to touch it are thousands; and this example will suffice for all.
Thus, as the antithesis of life is death, in its presence all the arrows of our pride lose their sharpness, all our hopes are torn, all our joys shattered. In the delirium of passion and pride we all repeat hundreds of times: "I would have her dead rather than belonging to another—a thousand times buried, but not unfaithful." And frequently the man who utters this blasphemy, his lips livid and his hair standing on end, stains his hands with blood by plunging them into the bosom of a victim. Folly and delirium! Hurricanes of the heart where love and hatred, pride and love, crime and torture clash and blend in the tumult of a dreadful storm. But love, which truly loves, infinite love which transforms man into the half of a creature that suffers and desires, ideal love that few feel and few see dimly in the twilight of a suprasensible region which their hands cannot reach, recognizesno greater torture than the death of the beloved. Oh, yes; let indifference, contempt, hatred, betrayal come, but that the dear one may live. Let others have this creature whom we have believed to be ours, into whose veins we have poured our blood; let this temple, perfumed with the incense of our thoughts, with the durable love of all our passions, become the temple of another god; let our flowers be trampled upon, our crowns broken, ourselves driven away by the rough broom of the sexton, but let the god live who sojourns there, let the idol of our life shine on the altar. Dejected like a fugitive, despised like a criminal, vituperated like a spy, in the cold and distant solitude we drink drop by drop a bottomless cup of gall, and every drop is bitterer than the last; but we know that she breathes the air of our planet, which we too breathe; we know that she is inebriated by the same sun that warms us; we know that among the numberless shadows that wander through the spaces of the invisible there is a creature around whom the air becomes mellower and the light brighter; that there are certain clods of earth which yield to the weight of a body that we love. No; as long as the woman we love lives, hope does not lose all its feathers, and far, far away, less tangible than a dream, more invisible than the regions of heaven, more inconceivable than eternity, it still soars on our horizon, perhaps not believed, not confessed, but it still lives and keeps us alive.
But when we still live and she is dead; when we are still so cowardly as to live, to breathe, to eat, and she is buried in the humid miasma of a wooden coffin; when all the world still exists and she is dead; when the joy of a thousand flowers that blossom in every ray of light, the trills of a thousand birds that sing of love, the groups of the fortunates who embrace each other, and the benedictions of so many happy creatures are nothing but a frame to a gelid void, a dark world; when we remain suspended between an infinity of joy thatwasours and an infinity of sorrow thatisours and shall be ours tomorrow and as long as we are so cowardly as to live,—then we may look upon suicide as thesupreme joy of life, as the most sublime of human prides; then we may understand how man can in a flash dream of the great voluptuousness of mingling his bones with those of another creature; then we can understand how imagination can smile at the idea of the embrace of two corpses, of the fusion of two ashes, of the resurrection of two existences extinguished in the perfume of two flowers grown upon a human grave and which the wind blandly brings together that they may kiss again.
In the silence of the cemeteries there are some flowers that kiss each other and to which, perhaps, from under the earth responds the quivering of certain bones; there are certain lips on our planet, which closely pressed against each other one day, which death cruelly separated and which a second death has reunited forever. And when we survive, it is because a new organism has been created in us, and today we are no longer what we were yesterday. The thoughts of the past, the limbs of the past, all that we were yesterday is dead, dead forever; from the withered trunk of our existence, science, duty, friendship, paternal or maternal or filial love cause a new branch to shoot forth, which reproduces the ancient tree; and the common passer-by, seeing the same leaves, the same flowers, the same fruits, believes that only one corpse is buried there—but he is in error. We can survive certain sorrows on one condition only: to accomplish the miracle of dying today in order to be born anew tomorrow with the same name, but with a new life. And for the honor of human nature, these survivors remain the faithful and silent priests of the vanished god, like those Peruvians who, on the summits of the Andes, amidst the eternal glaciers of the Sorata or of the Illimani, still worship the god of their fathers. To understand certain sorrows is the proof of a lofty mind; to have experienced them is the glory of a martyr which exalts and purifies us.
I feel very sure that many who weep for love, either because their love is not returned or because they fear deception—if they have not already been deceived—or because oftheir bitter disappointment when they found that they had burned their incense to an idol of clay or a statue of marble, will repute my description exaggerated, yet it is nevertheless a pallid picture of a sorrow which pen of man will never be able to portray from nature, but succeed only in divining from afar. To many death, the absolute evil, in the presence of which every hope perishes, seems preferable to the torture that threatens life yet does not kill, which opens the wounds and hinders the work done by nature to heal them. I wish that these gentlemen may never have the opportunity of making the cruel comparison for themselves, of experiencing the effects of an assimilated anatomy of two great sorrows, one of which is termed death, the other desperation. If they truly love, may they die earlier than their beloved! This is the sweetest blessing that I can offer them from the pages of my book.
Love is a passion so fervid and so deep that we must not wonder if it has abrupt convulsions and sudden swoons. Accustomed to dwell always in lofty regions, to have but extreme voluptuousness for nourishment, to vibrate with the highest notes of sentiment and the delirium of the senses, it may instantaneously become possessed, when it least expects it, by unreasonable fears, idiotic suspicions, inexplicable restlessness. By this I do not mean diffidence, jealousy, disgust, weary libertinism, or bitter disappointments, but a vague and shapeless fog that invades the heart which, by feeling too deeply, has become languid and congeals the nerves exhausted from excessive quivering. It is an indefinable hysteria which from a slight disorder may develop into a most intense bitterness.
An immense love, whatever the source of the heart from which it springs forth, is always followed by the shadow of an infinite fear. You adore your child; you have left him for five minutes on the lawn or in your garden, intent on filling his little cart with sand; he was as rosy and fresh as the flowers near him; as bright as the sun that gilded his curly locks. Now, while you are seated at your table, you have wished to call him, I know not why, perhaps to hear thesweet sound of his silvery voice; and he does not answer you. You call him again, and again silence. He is utterly absorbed in the ponderous care of his wagon; but you, flying in a few seconds over a thousand miles of thought, have imagined that he was dead, that a snake had bitten him, that he had fallen in a swoon—who knows the fantastic visions that have passed through your mind! With your heart throbbing, your skin in a perspiration, you are afraid to rise and wish to defer for a moment the spectacle of a cruel loss. Of these and greater follies we are given a sad spectacle every day by that love of loves which alone was called by this name as the prince and god of all the amorous sentiments.
Neither the most patient and long observation of human phenomena nor the most lively imagination could enable us to divine all the petty tortures that lovers inflict upon themselves, perhaps to obey that cruel law which, according to some persons, has decreed that no one shall be happy on this planet.
In this field of evil, temperament is everything; to some individuals the phrase of Linnæus concerning the loves of the cat may be applied: "Clamando misere amat." For these unfortunates (we have already described them) love is imbued with so much bitterness and surrounded by so many nettles that it actually resembles a bramble, all thorns and wormwood. Suspicious, fastidious, melancholy, they fear everything, scrutinize everything; they pass everything through the sieve, they pulverize everything, looking for the mite or the poison. In the kiss they suspect ice, in the caress indifference; of the impulses they feel only the shock, only the blows. And then, even that little honey that love has for all they wish to keep under watch in so many tabernacles and under so many seals that they are very fortunate when they can find and relish it! From a jealous jeremiad they fall into an hysterical soliloquy, and have hardly emerged from a gloomy meditation on the infidelity of man when they fall into the autopsy of a love-letter. These creatureswere certainly born under an unlucky star, and even if nature should make them a gift of a Venus draped by the Graces, or an Apollo with the brain of Jupiter, they would still be always unhappy, because bitterness is on their lips and not in the cup of love.
There is perhaps no greater torture than that which a woman must suffer when compelled to submit to the caress of a man whom she does not love. I do not mean by this the brutal violence that assimilates an embrace to homicide, and relegates it to the criminal code and the prison. In this case we would have a human beast that strikes, bites, sheds the blood of a poor creature who swoons with terror or struggles powerlessly in the clutches of a tiger: they are sorrows which belong to the story of terror, to the bloodiest pages of supreme tortures. I intend to speak here of the caresses that a woman must accord to a man because law, money or a surprise of the senses has sold her to him without love; I intend to speak of torture bitter, somber, deep as infinity, and which assimilates the prostitute to the martyr.
These sorrows, among the greatest that the human heart can suffer, were by a cruel nature almost exclusively reserved for woman. Man, by the special nature of his aggressive sex, must be spurred to the embrace by a sudden enthusiasm; his senses must be clouded by intense lust. In him voluptuousness can do without love, and physical love has a joy that is sufficient to conceal mercifully all his lack of sentiment and passion. For if indifference, hatred, contempt permeate him entirely, invading even the last intrenchments of love, then no caress in the world can revive it, no law, human or divine, can force him to accept a caress which to him is repugnant. There is no case in which the ancient theory of freedom of the will shows its ridiculous falsity as plainly as in this.
Woman, however, may be as cold as ice, feel chilly shivers of aversion and loathing run through her entire body, hate a man to the desire of death, despise to abhorrence a man who is near to her; and yet in many cases she can, and in very many she must, submit to his caress. Frigid, with grief inher heart and hatred on her lips, she beholds the ardor of that man which burns but does not warm her; she looks on the sublimity of enthusiasm only as the culmination of ridicule; she discerns passion, but finds it simply grotesque; she perceives impetuosity, and for her it is nothing but violence; instead of love, with its flashes, its light, its perfumes, she sees, smells, touches simply a brutal force which debases, prostitutes, pollutes her; an infinity of repugnance in an ocean of nausea!
When woman has fallen into that mire through her own fault, she cannot be more cruelly punished. The immensity of prostitution is avenged with an infinity of outrage; the holiest thing is plunged into the most fetid mud; the greatest joy gives place to the greatest shame. But when, on the contrary, the daughter of Eve is brought to this sacrifice of the body by the tyranny of the law, by the perverted tendencies of our moral education, when she finds herself led to that cruel misfortune through ignorance or through the fault of others,—then, if she does not yet possess that skepticism which heals the heart or that cynicism which shields it, if she still knows what modesty is, if she still remembers the trepidations of love, then that poor woman drinks drop by drop the most cruel torture that any creature can endure; then she passes through a long and merciless agony.
To have dreamed for years and years of the promised land of love, to have conquered it, inch by inch, through the reveries of childhood and the rosy aurora of adolescence; to have felt an immense, horrible fear of dying before having loved; to have loved and to love, to be aware of a volcano in the heart, to be at the gates of paradise and inhale through the portal its inebriating perfumes—and then, after all this, to become conscious of having been transformed into a vessel which satisfies the thirst, to feel in the bosom a roaring beast—to be a part of the régime of a man, like magnesia or leeches—truly this is more cruel torture than the inquisitors ever invented; it is really too great a sorrow for a lonely weak creature!
What mass of meditations, what abysses of desperation aregathered in a few seconds in the head of a woman caressed by a man whom she does not love! What eloquence in silence, that silence which Ovid, the libertine, eagerly advised women to avoid! Often does a man press to his bosom a creature who does not love him and whom he too heedlessly prostitutes, while the victim meditates a long, cruel revenge. More than one adultery, more than one assassination was conceived, discussed, vowed in that moment when man, enjoying the supreme bliss, believed to have in his arms a happy creature. More than one embrace has generated twins, a new man and a new hatred; a tenacious and bitter hatred, which only the death of the one who hates can extinguish, since it often survives the death of its object.
O men, you who see in love a cup to empty, and find in matrimony only an association of two capitals or a mechanism for reproducing the species, remember that for many creatures love is the first and the last of passions, the first and the last of joys; and remember that for very many women, whom you neglect and perhaps despise, love is all of life.
There is no nature so unhappy that its distress could not be relieved by another nature capable of mending the shreds of the heart, tempering the bitterness, straightening the rachitic limbs. There is no man, born weak or sickly, who could not become robust if he only should live in a climate, be supplied with food and surrounded with the physical and moral atmosphere that agrees with him. And I believe that the same can apply to love. If we could dedicate half a century to the search for the right woman, if Diogenes' lantern could be fitted with the electric light which modern science concedes to us, certainly among the thousand millions of human beings who tread this planet we could and should be able to find the woman who would be happy with us and make us happy. Unfortunately, life is too short and love is too rapid and exacting in its desires to make such a search possible; and even for the most fortunate and wisest creatures a part of happiness is always among the unknown quantities determined by chance and not by reflection. Hencemany and beautiful natures are tied by love-knots, and still are not happy because characters fit each other on many sides of the human polygon but not on all.
The study of these contrasts, of these partial incompatibilities would require the moral analysis of the entire man, of all his social vicissitudes, while many of those sorrows do not belong solely to love, but spring from all human affections and poison friendship, fraternal, filial and paternal loves; some of them, however, are peculiar to the love of loves.
To feel at the same hour, at the same moment, in the same degree, the stimulus of a desire or the thirst for a caress is a rare thing, a fortunate coincidence which gilds with the most beautiful rays the happiest hours of life; but it can never be the bread of a daily bliss. In all other cases, thirst arises in one of the two and is communicated to the other, so that a spark draws a spark, a caress generates caresses. It is an invitation of lips, a fluttering of wings, a harmonious note which calls from a bough to another bough; but it is always the invitation to a rendezvous, the awakening of one who slumbers. In these invitations, in these first skirmishes, the ridiculous always runs parallel and very near to the sublime. Love stands between them, it is true, and never permits them to unite; but the least inadvertence, the least unscrupulous or heedless movement may bring the two elements into contact; and the ridiculous, wherever it touches, wounds self-love and, with it, love.
Even upon the most impatient, the most ridiculous, the most grotesque desires you should throw at once the mantle of love to cover them. Every threat of ridicule then vanishes like vapor; no wounding of self-love is possible. I address myself to woman, because she oftener than we has the opportunity of healing these unsightly wounds, because she has her hand suavely ready to aid. Woe, if your companion should blush through your fault, because you knew not at the proper time and place how to close your eyes or shield them with the merciful veil of your hand or your love!
How much bitterness, how much rancor and spite, how many nettles and thorns are found on the blooming paths of the most fervid passion, just because delicacy of sentiment does not always know how to reconcile the inequalities of the senses, because a too exacting modesty repels a too live ardor of temperament, or because woman does not decide with wise perception that the too exacting demands, prompted by selfish love and not by love, should be allowed to starve! By fleeing one may lose or conquer; by standing one's ground one may lose or conquer: but many flee when they should not recede, many stand firm when they should flee; hence many defeats which disappoint both conquerors and conquered, and love often lies on the ground drenched with its own blood.
The tortures, the spites, the bitternesses, the wearinesses, the stings, the torments of love should be deeply studied because they always move side by side with joy and voluptuousness, and very few are so fortunate as not to stumble against them. Much luck, a thorough knowledge of man, great experience can defend us from them, so that at the end of our career we may bless love, which, though with some slight sorrow, has perfumed our life with its most beautiful flowers.
I have alluded only to some of the torments which populate the hell of love; but their number is infinite, their names are countless. In every field of sentiment, of senses and of intellect man possesses a much greater possibility to suffer than to enjoy; and when bliss is attained and the veins are cut from which oozes the bitter sap of sorrow, it is always after a long, fierce battle, in which we defend ourselves with all the weapons of nature and art. Here also—and here more, perhaps, than anywhere else—the weight of mental virtues is revealed in all its power, the influence of a noble and generous character in all its strength. The ardent and impetuous heart is not a source of greater amorous bitterness when the calm light of reason burns within it, when the sublime incapacity to commit base actions accompanies thedesire for the good, when we enjoy more the pleasure we give than that which we receive.
Weak and defective natures are strengthened and straightened when they have for support the robust column of an affectionate and noble nature; even the rabid rancors of small hearts lose their bitterness in the calm blue ocean of a character which is all sweetness and sympathy.